CIMAM 2025

On the occasion of CIMAM‘s General Assembly, which took place yesterday, 8 December, in Los Angeles, Suhanya Raffel, President of CIMAM and Director of M+ in Hong Kong, and Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, President of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, announced that Turin will be the next city to host CIMAM’s 57th Biennale in 2025.

The event, organised by CIMAM, is supported by Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT and Fondazione CRT and co-curated by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Fondazione Torino Musei and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, with the participation of the city’s museums and institutions.

CIMAM returns to Italy after almost 50 years, since 1976, when the conference was held in Bologna and Prato, for its only stop in our country in over 60 years of annual conferences.

The Scientific Committee for the CIMAM Annual Conference 2025 was also announced, composed of CIMAM Board members Chus Martinez, Director of the Art Gender Nature Institute in Basel – who will chair the committee – Kamini Sawhney, independent curator, Malgorzata Ludwisiak, Artistic Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Leevi Haapala, Dean of the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki, and Victoria Noorthoorn, Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, and by the directors and curators of the host institutions: Francesco Manacorda, Director of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Chiara Bertola, Director of the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, Bernardo Follini, Senior Curator of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and Davide Quadrio, Director of the MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale.

Suhanya Raffel remarked on the conference’s ambitious goals: “In Turin, we would like to propose a dynamic and very open and participative exercise consisting of exploring together the difficulties of enduring game-changing hardships while breeding new paradigms in our field. A case study based conference oriented towards providing us with a collectively made tool kit to counteract the multitude of challenges that too often leave us feeling overwhelmed and disempowered in our daily tasks as art professionals. Epictetus —a Greek Stoic philosopher—wrote: “Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing.” Indeed, this is what we would love to analyze together in Turin: our doing and the relevance of practice-based culture to guarantee a life-intelligent, caring future.”

Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo commented: “We are delighted to be hosting CIMAM’s Annual conference in Turin—where we will be framing the collective discussion among the members and external experts around an attempt to identify how art and culture still can shape the form of our future. Turin has experienced and embodied, through centuries of history, the importance of culture for human society and what it means to move from theory to fieldwork. Turin is a learning city where we would like to host the transnational art community that CIMAM embodies and invite all the members to embark on the exercise of thinking about the structural transformations of our field, the new beginnings we are compelled to explore together, the new alliances among fields and also economic sectors to guarantee a central position of art and culture in our societies.”

The other venues to host the event will be officially announced in the coming months.

About CIMAM

CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) is the only worldwide network of directors and curators of modern and contemporary art museums. Founded in The Hague in 1962, CIMAM is an affiliated organization of ICOM (International Council of Museums).

CIMAM’s vision is of a world in which the cultural, social, and economic impact of modern and contemporary art museums, collections, and archives on society is widely recognized. To fulfill this vision, CIMAM’s mission is to create an international and professional forum to discuss and share knowledge on topics of interest through key initiatives, such as the CIMAM Annual Conference, provide support aligned with the ethical values of the ICOM and CIMAM Code of Ethics, establish guidelines, protocols, and benchmarks of best museum practice, and to contribute to the growth of the sector by facilitating cooperation and professional development. Led by an International Board of Museum Directors and Curators, the organization draws on the collective experience of its members to advance the sector and realize the shared vision. www.cimam.org